Towards an Anthropology of the Mediterranean

Abstract

Three contradictory images emerge when one examines the disparate works by historians and anthropologists that have taken the Mediterranean world as their subject: a Mediterranean of exchanges and encounters, a Mediterranean of conflicts and hatred, and a Mediterranean made of societies revealing, beyond the schisms that divide them, “family resemblances”. In this article, the author proposes another way of seeing and perceiving the Mediterranean world, neither as an entity united by the same culture, nor as a juxtaposition of heterogeneous blocs, but rather as a system of complementary differences that, according to the context, can result in well‐meaning co‐existence or bloody confrontation.

Keywords:

• Anthropology of the Mediterranean
• Intercultural Relations
• Conflict

Notes

[1] On Mediterranean history, see the synthesis edited by Carpentier and Lebrun (1998).

[2] Regarding this astonishing monarch, see the classic work of Kantorowicz (2000).

[3] Regarding Alexandria in the contemporary era, see Ilbert (1996).

[4] “It must be repeated,” comments Alain de Libera (1999: 26; emphasis added), “it is a translation within the land of Islam, connected to the Muslim conquest, which made possible the return of Greek science into the Latin world. But Greek science did not arrive alone. Arabic science accompanied it. And further, the figure of the Muslim intellectual from whom came, despite what is said and contrary to all expectations, the earliest version of the European intellectual, the university magister atrium, the professor of philosophy.”

[5] Regarding these contemporary commercial networks, see Peraldi (2001); Cesari (2002).

[6] Regarding this anthropological invention of the Mediterranean, see Bromberger (2001, 2002); Bromberger and Durand (2001).

[7] On the subject of iconophobia, see Goody (1997); Centlivres (2003).

[8] Freud used this concept three times in his work: in Psychologie des masses et analyse du moi (Massenpschologie und Ich‐Analyse) (Freud, 2003 [1920]: Vol. 16: 40); Le tabou de la virginité (Das Tabu der Virginität) (Freud, 2002 [1918]: Vol. 15: 86); and Malaise dans la culture (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) (Freud, 2002 [1930]: Vol. 18: 473–474). In the last work, he wrote:

It is always possible to link people to each other in love in a big enough crowd of people, if only there remain others to whom one can show aggression. Once I studied the phenomenon according to which, precisely, neighbouring communities, also close to each other, fight and make fun of each other, like the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the Germans of the North and those of the South, the English and the Scots, etc. I have given this phenomenon the name “narcissism of small differences”. … One recognises in this a commodious and relatively anodyne satisfying of the penchant for aggression through which community cohesion is more easily assured.

[9] The dragoman (interpreter in the Ottoman Empire) incarnated both the positive figure of a cosmopolitan guide and a tragic hero. “The Empire was suspicious,” comments Ismaïl Kadaré (2003: 13). “To them, the knowledge of two languages introduced the unavoidable possibility of cheating, and the masses, from whom the interpreter often came, considered him a ‘collaborator’. One suspects the interpreter of betrayal: those who are dominated suspect him of being an accomplice of the dominant, and the dominant of conniving with those they are subjugating.”